Henry Edward Manning

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All human conflict is ultimately theological.

The Most Reverend Dr Henry Edward Cardinal Manning (15 July 1808 – 14 January 1892) was an English Roman Catholic Archbishop of Westminster and a cardinal.

Quotes[edit]

  • God knows that I would rather stand in the lowest place within the Truth, than in the highest without it. Nay, outside the Truth the higher the worse. It is only so much more opposition to Truth, so much more propagation of falsehood.
    • Letter to Robert Wilberforce (Rome, 15 February 1848); in Edmund Sheridan Purcell, Life of Cardinal Manning, Vol. I (London: Macmillan and Co., 1896), p. 513.
  • All human conflict is ultimately theological.
    • In conversation with Hilaire Belloc (around 1890). Reported in Hilaire Belloc, The Cruise of the "Nona" (1925). Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1958, p. 48.
    • What Manning meant, Belloc explains, is "that all wars and revolutions, and all decisive struggles between parties of men arise from a difference in moral and transcendental doctrine" (p. 48), since no man, "arguing for what should be among men, but took for granted as he argued that the doctrine he consciously or unconsciously accepted was or should be a similar foundation for all mankind. Hence battle." (p. 49)
  • Praise consists in the love of God, in wonder at the goodness of God, in recognition of the gifts of God, in seeing God in all things He gives us, ay, and even in the things that He refuses to us; so as to see our whole life in the light of God; and seeing this, to bless Him, adore Him, and glorify Him.
    • Reported in Josiah Hotchkiss Gilbert, Dictionary of Burning Words of Brilliant Writers (1895), p. 456.

Towards Evening (1889)[edit]

Towards Evening: Extracts from the Writings of Cardinal Manning, compiled by A. M. W., 2nd edition (1889). London: Kegan Paul, Trench & Co.
  • No ignorance of truth is a personal sin before God, except that ignorance which springs from personal sin.
    • p. 34
  • A necessity of my reason constrains me to believe the existence of God, because I can in no other way account for my own existence. I am either uncaused, or self-caused, or caused by a cause.
    • p. 51
  • There are only two centres, God and ourselves; and we must rest on one or the other. We cannot rest on both.
    • p. 93
  • Our character is our will; for what we will we are.
    • p. 136.
  • The softness, and the glare, and the temptations, and the licence, and the lax examples about us, are more seducing and dangerous than the winter of penal laws. They hardened the manhood of Catholic parents. The summer sun relaxes many.
    • p. 144.
  • God attracts us to Him by instincts, and desires, and aspirations after a happiness higher than sense, and more enduring, more changeless, than this mortal life. God speaks to us articulately in the stirring life of nature, and in the silence of our own being.
    • p. 158

Quotes about Manning[edit]

  • In an address before the "Academia," which had been organized to combat "science falsely so called," Cardinal Manning declared his abhorrence of the new view of Nature, and described it as "a brutal philosophy—to wit, there is no God, and the ape is our Adam." …These attacks from such eminent sources set the clerical fashion for several years.

External links[edit]